May 27
Westminster Book Group
19:30 am • Fellowship
10:00 am • Presentation
Goodpasture Hall
James by Everett Percival
Presenter: Ray Berry
Percival Everett’s James reimagines Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In a masterful way with emphasis on the character’s humanity, Everett presents Jim, here called James, the slave who tries to escape on a trip down the Mississippi with Huck Finn. Rather than telling the story in Huck’s young, naive, nineteenth-century voice, Everett presents the events from James’s point of view, beautifully depicting his intelligence, compassion, and struggle. Readers immediately see the tragic truth of Jim’s situation in a less humorous light than in Twain’s novel. Everett examines themes of freedom, identity, and belonging. Readers do not need to dig out old copies of Twain’s novel to understand this retelling. Indeed, reviewers of the novel comment that it “honors and interrogates” the original novel. In an interview for his Booker Prize nomination, Everett wrote the following: “ I hope that I have written the novel that Twain did not and could not have written.” A thought-provoking book about race and an intelligent, marginalized man, it provides important insight for our relationships with others today.
